Current Projects

Multispecies Thick Mapping - Agrigento, Sicily

AGRIGENTO has been selected as the Italian Capital of Culture for 2025.

This project is one of the official initiatives of the Agrigento 2025 program. It seeks to harness cultural theory and interdisciplinary scholarship to create a a public-facing website that will become a lasting resource to enhance the public’s understanding of the diverse territories of Agrigento via the theme of water.

By doing so, the project will illustrate the utility of the new method of "multispecies thick mapping" developed by the lab that makes visible multispecies ecocultural links in places of ecocultural importance. Multispecies Thick Mapping draws from thick mapping techniques pioneered by digital humanities scholars such as Todd Presner. It is one of the primary new approaches developed by Vetri Nathan via this lab and will be explained in more detail in his in-progress manuscript (see below).

The digital resource produced in this project will be different from typical touristic prespectives, but rather will seek to superimpose many layers (thick mapping)  in the one or two locations of ecocultural importance in the Agrigento province. Each "layer" of the multispecies thick map will focus on one aspect or story of the site that will guide the viewers to the trans-naturalcultural, transhistorical and multispecies entanglements that sustain the complexity and diversity of the physical, cultural and ecological aspects of the location(s). 

The Global Mediterranean - Between California and Europe

This umbrella theme seeks to comparatively explore local and global locations of "Mediterreanean-ness" both in terms of an imagined cultural landscape and a material ecocultural and ecological system. 

Global Somali Diasporic Foodways

This project explores the (re)creation, (re)inscription, and dissemination of Somali nationhood vis-à-vis diverse culinary foodways utilized by its global diasporic communities. Via an analysis of a diverse range of digital culinary representations, this project demonstrates that Somali diasporic cuisine is an excellent case study for a better understanding of food as a vector of national identity in a transnational context. This research argues that the cultural/artistic/culinary process of what Prof. Nathan calls “creative nostalgia” leads to the intermingling of (hi)stories and foods. This creative process mirrors the transcultural mix of ingredients and flavor principles of Somali cuisine itself and also reflects the hybridity of media (Whatsapp, TikTok, cookbooks, TV shows) utilized to create and share recipes, techniques, and etiquette.

The "Long Italian Anthropocene"

Europe's temperatures are increasing approximately twice as fast the global average due to anthropogenic climate change, making it the fastest-warming continent on the planet. Despite this dramatic contemporary reality, Italy's natural and cultural trajectories have long been intimately interconnected, yet understudied and undervalued. 

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This umbrella project aims to promote a diverse range of newer research approaches in Italian and Mediterranean Studies that overcome the corrosive nature/culture divide to explore the inmate connections between Italian cultural practices and discourse—broadly understood—and the natural world.

Which theoretical approaches can be harnessed to better include and understand natural agents as an integral participants of ecocultural co-becoming rather than a passive backdrop for human concerns? Could we justify and examine a “Long” Italian Anthropocene that encompasses many different historical eras (Early Modern, Risorgimento, Colonial, Liberal, Fascist, Postwar, Postcolonial and/or Contemporary)? 

Documentary Project 
Our Multispecies Futures: Bison in the Greater Yellowstone Ecocultural System

This ongoing project seeks to demonstrate the incredible yet challenging healing possibilities of embodied multispecies restoration. Specifically, it examines the story of bison (American buffalo)  through an exploration of the nexus of multispecies relationalities in the Wind River Tribal Reservation located in the Greater Yellowstone National Park ecosystem. This project seeks to contribute in restoring respect of and value for tribal experts, knowledge and practices of  ecocultural restoration.

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 Filming was completed in November 2023, with post-production to be completed by Summer 2026.

Book Project: The Cybercene - Our Multispecies Futures

This in-progess volume proposes a new ecocultural sub-era of the Anthropocene, called the Cybercene in order to analyze the intimate connections between the global digital revolution and ecocultural health and sustainability.

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​Utilizing a global and interdisciplinary ecosystem of theory and case studies, this book proposes epistemic humility and a re-valuation and integration of embodied knowledge of marginalized multispecies communities (human and nonhuman) as key to “restorying” the Cybercene and healing the increasingly frayed bonds of multispecies kinship.

Italian Foodways and "Dunki" Migrations

This project seeks illustrate the Cybercene era’s mechanisms of commodification, othering and wasting by starting with an ecocultural analysis of the life and death of a migrant agricultural worker in Italy in June 2024, Mr. Satnam Singh.

Mr. Singh’s story of modern racialized enslaved labor will be followed by a broader exploration and analysis of the contemporary phenomenon of “dunki” (donkey) migration from India to Europe and North America as an example of colonial-Cybercene multispecies, multi-kind and multi-era ecocultural co-becoming. Via this analysis, this project seeks to demonstrate that qualitative humanistic analysis of natureculture as undertaken by The Cybercene Lab can provide an essential compliment to more data-driven analyses of our digitally-connected societies.